dendrite

A Rust library with examples and other tools for exploring the accuracy of branch prediction strategies over traces.

Building Instrumentation

This project depends on using some kind of binary instrumentation to capture traces. Currently, only x86 platforms are supported.

See pin/ for instructions on how to build the dendrite plugin for Intel Pin.

NOTE: See dynamorio/ for instructions on how to build the plugin for DynamoRIO (warning: will be deprecated and replaced by Pin in the near future)

Building this Project

You can build the library and all included binaries with the following:

$ cargo build --release
... 

Predictors and Building Blocks

This library also includes some [potentially incorrect and/or unfinished] implementations of different branch predictors and common components that you can use to implement them, ie.

• Tables, saturating counters, a naive perceptron
• Trivial predictors (always-taken, never-taken, random, etc)
• A configurable TAGE ("TAgged GEometric length") predictor

Sometime in the future, this project will also include components for reasoning about target predictors (ie. branch target buffers, return-address predictors, indirect predictors, etc).

Binaries

dendrite/src/bin contains utilities, examples, and other experiments:

• read-trace: Print the contents of a trace file
• analyze-trace: Print statistics about branch behavior in a trace
• evaluate: Evaluate built-in predictors against a trace

Typical usage looks something like this:

# Use Intel Pin to write a trace
$ /opt/intel-pin/pin -t pin/obj-intel64/dendrite.so -o /tmp/trace.bin -- ls
...

# Print the raw entries in the trace
$ cargo run --release --bin read-trace -- /tmp/trace.bin
...